4: Culture spirals, recursion and acceleration

neural shroud

Humans thrive when building cultures. As countries, as companies, as communes, as vaguely affiliated entities and everything in between. Progress and the formative processes of a culture go hand in hand in a very clean positive feedback loop. And it is also the behavior humans engage in during the majority of their conscious existence.

Left to their own devices, humans are a hive of culture-building creatures. However, almost all culture inevitably leads to a commitment to traditional values. As a culture becomes more layered and intricate, human brains develop strongly connected neural pathways and our pattern-matching minds seek solace in conservatism. Which, as the reader probably knows, leads to stagnation, irrational and pointless clinging to the impractical past, refusing to move on.

But a simple dismissal of these culture-building mechanics does not solve the issue if our goal is the search for acceleration. Of course, avoiding stagnation by all means necessary is a noble cause. But the initial phase of a new culture is the perfect booster for progress, new ideas and overall movement forward of all those involved. But this movement is, of course, unsustainable. Which means a culture has to be cultivated up to some point of equilibrium of maximum momentum vs. effort. Then it has to be dismantled or abandoned and everybody should move onto the next thing. This principle can be applied on any level of human life. Countries, civil movements, schools of thought, even twitter circles, etc.

Of course this process of continuously bootstrapping things sounds suspiciously like a culture itself. So it also has to be eventually abandoned. However, what comes next? Can we reinvent the process of inventing cultures? Do we move onto something completely different? But what happens when this process gets stale and stagnant? An infinite layer of things that have to be abandoned. The question is ever looming: what now? There is not enough energy in the universe to store even the briefest of solutions if we continue like this.

But as we know from math, computation and programming, the answer in this kind of a situation is recursion. The cold goddess of maddening spirals that can be either comprehended in her full glory or not at all. Her light can either illuminate your path until the very end or leave you in complete darkness. No half measures.

While this sounds like a vaguely reasonable concept, it's quite hard to apply to the realm of meat. Recursive culture-building means we have to build sub-cultures. Deeper and deeper, until every single person is their own little bubble. At which point the progress ceases to go on and we reach ultimate stagnation. A dead end. The goddess completes her work. A terminal state of the function.

However, this is only true if the recursive functions even has a terminal state. In math and programming that has to be the case, otherwise there is no solution, no end, a stack overflow happens and we're left with nothing. But we are not interested in a definite solution. We are after ultimate acceleration here. The world itself will provide us with a pseudo-terminal state when the imperfections of the physical realm sum up to be enough to cause a major shift in at least something. And that's maybe good enough.

So, we're left with a recursive function with no terminal state. For building cultures. Waves, helixes, spirals, fractals. Undulating, splitting, merging, imploding. This essentially means that actually, the form and size of a culture does not matter at all. And we've come back around to the very beginning. What if this process becomes stale? But it can not, for we've traced its fate only to swallow our own tail. Q.E.D.

There is no requirement of moving down or up in size. No preferred direction or guidelines. Just the need to create. Without end, without fail. Create, dismantle, build and abandon.